1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a fruit pitting machine specifically designed and structured to effect, in addition to the obvious separation of the pit from a drupaceous fruit, such as an olive, the concurrent separation of the pit from its core "cap" or disc-shaped portion of pulp which must be removed from the olive in order to create an orifice for the pit to exit the fruit.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Modern pitting machines, as is well known, are designed to run continuously and to feed olives singly and successively onto a drum where, in a cyclical process, they are held lengthwise while a tubular coring knife, whose diameter determines that of the aforementioned core cap, is applied to one end and a pitting plunger to the other end of the fruit. The pitting plunger pierces the pulp and pushes the pit and its attached core cap through the olive.
Existing pitting machines represent different versions of this basic principle. Some merely eject the pitted olives on one side and the capped pits on the other, whereas others separate the core caps from the pits and replace the caps immediately on the olives, or after they have been stuffed with some suitable material, such as anchovy or pimento paste, etc.
When the olives are not being stuffed, in order to utilize as much of their pulp as possible, the most appropriate and logical solution is to replace the core caps on the olives after the fruits are pitted.
In practice, however, this procedure is often ruled out because replacing the core caps on the olives prevents compliance with certain packing standards requiring that specific containers hold a specific number of olives with a specific net weight. Obviously, replacing the core caps on the olives is not desirable in that case. Thus, there is a substantial loss of material for, although the by-products of the pitting process are recoverable, top quality by-products like olive core caps, when they remain attached to the pits and are processed with them, lose their inherent high quality by virtue of their association with the pits, which results in a by-product of considerably lower quality whose industrial uses are totally different from those of the separated pulp.